Does 790FX + SB750 = High-End Overclocking?

Name: Too Little, Too Late - Does 790FX + SB750 = High-End Overclocking?
Author: Thomas Soderstrom

by Thomas Soderstrom November 13, 2008 at 12:10 AM

Too Little, Too Late

AMD created much excitement around its Spider platform launch a year ago, but that excitement was quickly diminished by problems such as TLB errata on early core revisions, low processor clock speeds, a delayed chipset component, and the lack of a top-end graphics solution. All but one of those problems have been addressed: slower processor clock speeds continue to keep AMD in the mid-priced value market. Anything less than awe-inspiring overclocking results would have been too little to cure AMD’s ills, and so it is.

AMD continues to provide leading value in quad-core optimized applications, simply because its Phenom X4s are relatively inexpensive. But today’s comparison motherboards are mid-priced gaming platforms. Most games can only use two cores at most, and the one popular game that does use all four cores doesn’t do it very effectively.

Fortunately for AMD enthusiasts, the 45 nm Deneb is close at hand (as suggested by the submission of 45 nm Opteron scores to SPEC’s site). Even if the results we’ve seen from ACC today are unable to wholly redeem Phenom in the face of enthusiasts, it remains to be seen how that game will change once Phenom slips into a more svelte manufacturing process and AMD is hopefully able to scale clock frequency more aggressively.

Summary

About the author

Thomas Soderstrom @hardware_tom

Thomas Soderstrom is a Senior Staff Editor at Tom's Hardware US. He tests and reviews cases, cooling, memory and motherboards.

This thread is closed for comments

61 comments

Comment from the forums

Your comment

afrobacon

very nice review
neiroatopelcc

"Also notice the removable BIOS IC, a feature that makes bad-flash recovery as easy as plugging in a replacement."
I don't know about you guys, but I haven't had a flash going wrong since a P2B board from the stoneage
cangelini

neiroatopelcc"Also notice the removable BIOS IC, a feature that makes bad-flash recovery as easy as plugging in a replacement."I don't know about you guys, but I haven't had a flash going wrong since a P2B board from the stoneage

Call it paranoia from a guy who changes BIOSs on an almost daily-basis on one board or another (me, not Thomas, though he does his fair share of updating, too).
neiroatopelcc

Perhaps it's just the luxury of gigabyte's dual bios that makes me not care for removable ic's but I just don't see the relevance. Nobody has an eprom writer for those chips at home anyway, and with prices of many motherboards closing in on what a new chip would cost it's only truely useful for the expensive boards - and if an amd board is expensive, then it's targetted at the wrong people.
slomo4sho

Thanks for the review. As you have stated, only way that AMD can compete with INTEL is to provide better clock speeds on their chips. Intel has shot forward with giant improvements and AMD has been stuck on the side lines. Their 45nm chips are still not on the market and Intel is already making moves to switch to 32nm.

Sadly, this is going to be tough hill to climb for AMD to become competitive again. I wish them luck though, the consumer is always the winner when corporations compete
Tropoc

Im sorry, but this is rubbish:

Ive got a phenom x4 9950 placed on a ASUS m3a32 mvp deluxe motherboard.

With stock voltage and stock cooling ive cranked it up to 3.2ghz and it runs perfectly stable. (this was done by only adjusting the multiplier)

A friend of mine have the same setup as me but an aftermarket cooler (noctua nh-u12p) and hes overclocked it up to 3.4ghz, again running stable.

On Overclocking forums i read about people cranking this CPU up to 3.6ghz on air (noctua nh-u12p) without any wizardry.

This test is flawed and im very dissapointed about tomshardware and what i feel is an effortless test of this setup.

Im an Intel guy myself but at least im honest about intels oponents, and in this case the review should end up with AMD being amazing value for money and that the future is a bit (not alot) brighter for AMD.
slomo4sho

You realize that the Q6600 can also be overclocked to 3.6GHz on air as well without much difficulty? Both processors are at the same price point. The only difference is that the 9950 is AMD's top end chip and the Q6600 is a entry level quad core from Intel...
Tropoc

im aware of that yes, but the problem here is tomshardware not the q6600... why? they didnt get it over 3.12ghz, which frankly is pathetic.

and the 9950 is cheaper then the q6600 its cheaper then about every intel processor out there (even the dual cores such as e8400 etc).

Im not saying it is a better processor then what intel has lined up, what im saying is that it is amazing value for money. and much better at overclocking then tomshardware managed to get out of it thats all
marzzes

Oh my God, you guys went with a Jetway over a DFI board! Not to mention just one vidio card and a mid range one at that, how about two 4870X2’s??.. I mean isn’t that what we buy these boards for?…….Oh and what kind of memory each board can handle or why didn’t you go with a Thermalright cpu cooler, hell if your going to oc water cooling is the way to go!
Obviously Tom wasn’t interested in doing this review!……..
geckoar

I got my 9950 running at 2.85 ghz so thir numbers are not too bad. Im running it on a 790FX+SB600 K9A2 mobo. I could go more but my DDR2 800 RAm is holdinmg me back... I guess I should have gotten DDR2 1066 RAM.
But I game at 1080P res. wiht a 4870 and I get over 30FPS in most of my games At max setting.

Good Review.
marzzes

http://www.dfi.com/portal/CM/cmproduct/XX_cmproddetail/XX_WbProdsWindow?itemId=547&downloadFlag=false&action=e&windowstate=normal&mode=view

Here ya go Tom.
neiroatopelcc

That thing has the third pcie slot in the very last spot making dualslot graphics impossible. And that in turns makes the motherboard useless as it no longer features anything intel can't do with it's x38 or p45 and a faster cpu
Crashman

marzzesOh my God, you guys went with a Jetway over a DFI board!

Article announced end of September. Submission deadline mid-October. DFI wasn't interested or otherwise didn't respond. DFI's inaction is unfortunate.
marzzes

Article announced end of September. Submission deadline mid-October. DFI wasn't interested or otherwise didn't respond. DFI's inaction is unfortunate.

If that’s the case one could argue that you guys write for manufacturers and not your readers.
Tjik

I'm also surprised to see DFI excluded, especially since you used DFI in some Intel test some time ago. I would definitely say DFI gives good value for money these days.

Another point: hasn't AMD quite clearly said it won't be able to compete with Intel high end CPU:s and hence is aiming at giving better value for money in the "mid-priced value market"? Yes I'm even quoting some words of the article, but my point is that because of this it's quite unnecessary to go on about "too little to cure AMD’s ills". Of course the AMD64 era was astonishing since AMD did the unthinkable with resources as big as Intel's pocket-money. To believe though that AMD would be able to over perform time after another is wishful thinking. It's already proven that even with a superior product AMD won't be able to get good enough sales. So if you're really interested in finding the cause of the illness, it's not to be found solely inside AMD's headquarters. Without their inventions I doubt we would have seen the light of anything in the series of Intel Core CPU:s.

There are several scenarios where I at the moment without hesitation would prefer Intel. If I did more rendering the Core i7 is a clear winner. Besides that even your Core i7 test showed that the 700/750 scales well when running more AMD/ATi graphic cards.

To choose AMD over Intel isn't stupid, it's just a question of individual computing routines, in some AMD gives great value even beyond the 4-core scenario you mention in the article. When looking through benchmarks it's necessary to evaluate it's impact on your personal computing. In many cases you get a overall figure like "this platform is XX % faster", but the reality is that might be much less because the benchmarks are irrelevant to my computing.

A long rant - and it's not a rant anyway - to convey a simple message:
- Intel has a great line up of CPU:s at the moment
- The above doesn't mean AMD "is ill" or disappointing

/A formed (with constant relapses!) narrow minded overclocker who found out that there's a lot of more fun computing stuff to do
The 9950 is NOT cheaper than the Q6600 -

9950 = $185 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103291

Q6600 = $180 (OEM) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115018

or $190 (Boxed) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115017

Either way, a five dollar difference is insignificant - they're about the same price.
marzzes

Two thumbs up Tjik.
neiroatopelcc

marzzesArticle announced end of September. Submission deadline mid-October. DFI wasn't interested or otherwise didn't respond. DFI's inaction is unfortunate.If that’s the case one could argue that you guys write for manufacturers and not your readers.

From where I'm standing it's the other way around really. It's the manufacturers not included that don't care about the readers. Those who sent in boards are those who care about us readers - and dfi appearently isn't one of them at this point. You can't blame toms for that really.
jameskangster

In my opinion, it's just really difficult for AMD to continue to compete effectively against Intel at this rate. Even while Intel is slashing their sales outlook, they are still well funded without having to rely on external investments and loans. Also, their new processor lines based on i7 are very promising with early positive performance reviews. Heck, their current Core 2 architecture isn't even close to their end of useful life cycle. Meanwhile, AMD HAS NOT produced any new performance-competitive CPU SKUs (even price-performance advantage has been losing ground), and they have been LOSING desktop/laptop market share. The only positive product line left for them is in the graphics market, and they actually have gained market share with 48XX series. I think they should focus most if not all of their talents and funding in their graphics technology, and phase out their processor line. Also, I know it's good to have a competitor to Intel, but at what cost to the AMD emplyees and investors? Would you rather have AMD go bankrupt and end up selling their assets to ______ (fill in the blank) or stay in business and use everything they know to continue to improve their strong points?
neiroatopelcc

I'd rather they merge their cpu division with cray or via than surrender to intel. Like any other enthusiast I am using an intel processor, but if they don't have any competition in 3 years time, then nobody will use intel, cause they'd stop developing - they'd become like microsoft's windows division - you can marvel at what they archieved in the past, but can't really appreaciate their current efforts. I don't want to hate intel, but if amd dies its inevitable.
Malovane

About the low overclock, I have to agree with the person who said it was a poor OC attempt. I myself am running a 9850 BE processor at 3.4 ghz stable at 1.4 volts...on air! That's using AMD Overdrive on a 790GX Foxconn board. I've pushed it higher.. just don't like my room to become a sauna. Anandtech got the venerable 9600 BE to 3.2Ghz, and others have pushed the 9850's and 9950's to 3.6ghz on water with little difficulty.

You should be able to hit 3.1ghz with almost no voltage increase.
chaohsiangchen

On the day which AMD released Opteron 2384 and 8384, we got this failed OC article instead of full coverage of Shanghai processors. Really nice job.
jadedgamerx

I have overclocked and managed both platforms in a multitude of different computing environments from servers to workstations to gaming desktops to clusters. One of the only places I see an issue is the pricing of the 9950 vs the Q6600, most of the time they are right on the money. The Athalon 64 4050e represents one of the things i love about AMD, you can run less than 1 volt on the core voltage and keep things stable for uses such as HTPC's and such, combine it with the 780/790G chipsets and they are the most efficient setups by far and the price is substantially lower than anything from Intel. I would still prefer a Core 2/i7 setup for straight gaming, but you cannot deny the value AMD offers it's customer's in the face of a Tyrant. Not to mention they are willing to hold onto old platforms that are more than sufficient for doing low horsepower tasks at a low price with low power requirements while Intel moves from socket to socket taking the upgrading path away from it's customer's and forcing them to re-engineer their entire setup around new ram, motherboard and cpu all at once. The Intel Atom is a joke, and if someone tries to compare them directly I'll slap them with a mackerel. Compare Xeon prices to Opteron's and the amount of processing power vs power draw. AMD still gives you the best bang for your buck in the enterprise market. AMD is not going to die people, they just need to rethink their business strategy a bit and continue to deliver on performance per dollar. /end rant
malveaux

Why do writers always claim "noticeable increase!" when it's 1 or 2 FPS over the competition and already over the 30fps mark? That's ridiculous. No one would ever notice that. It takes a computer to measure it in milliseconds. *Sigh*